Milk Powder Experiment And Its Effect On The Moon

The moon appears red during a lunar eclipse because the white light from the sun goes through the particles in the earth’s atmosphere, filtering out the other colors and turning it red. That light then goes past the earth and onto the moon; when it reflects back to the earth it makes the moon look red to us. In the milk powder experiment that we did in class, the milk powder made the light spread out, which impacted its color. When the water was clear in the fish tank the light was white. When the milk powder was mixed into the water, the light scattered (the light goes off in different directions) and refracted (the light bends or breaks as it goes through the medium) making it look reddish. Light gets less bright when it has to go through a longer distance because it has to go through more matter in the atmosphere.

Light coming at an angle from overhead (mid-day) is more direct light and from the side is more indirect at sunrise and sunset which is why at these times of day the sky is red. When the light was at the long end of the fish tank with the milk powder in it, the light seemed more red as it had to go through more These particles are called mediums, they absorb, transmit (the light goes through the particle), reflect (the light bounces off), and refract the light. In a simulation called the flashlight simulation, the simulation shows the process of the white light revealing all of its other colors and how these colors react in different scenarios. In the scenario of a lunar eclipse, the blue light gets scattered as it hits the mediums and the red light reacts differently creating the red moon. These experiments that we did prove this claim. In the flashlight simulation we can see that as the white light is stripped away, the other colors show